Revive Me: Part Three (New Haven #2)

by J.L. Seegars

An involuntary groan leaves my lips, and Mallory’s head snaps up. “You good?” She asks softly, more gentle than I expected. For the first time in a long time, she looks like the girl I fell in love with in college. The one who saw me as a safe place and not the source of some of her greatest pain. “Yeah.” My throat aches with things I can’t say, and I swallow against the pain. “Are you?”

Keeping my distance when we’ve just been so close is hard, but I know it’s necessary for her comfort and my sanity.

“Funny, the last guy I brought here said the same thing.” “That’s twice now you’ve thrown the men you’ve been with in my face. Should I take that as an invitation to mention the women I’ve had in my bed?” Several different emotions scatter across her features, and I watch as she fights to gain control of them. Her jaw turns rigid, anger and maybe a little jealousy glossing over her steely gaze. “Yes, please regale me with tales of all the women you fucked when you were supposedly yearning for me.” “Nah, I don’t think I will. You don’t need another thing to hold against me.” She pushes her lips out into an exaggerated pout. “Oh, so it was just the one?” “Would it make you feel better if I said yes?” “You could say you fucked a hundred women, and I wouldn’t care, Chris.” I would be inclined to believe her if she didn’t look so fucking angry about it. If the hurt behind her eyes didn’t make me regret every woman I tried to replace her with. If she didn’t look away from me moments after lying to me again.

Those words still haunt me every night in my dreams and sometimes when I’m awake too. For four years, I’ve turned over that request in my head, convincing myself honoring it was the right thing to do, only to come back here and find that she never meant it at all. “Right.” She nods. “And that’s the one time you decided to actually give me what I wanted.” “I always try to give you what you want, princess. I’m sorry that I don’t always get it

right.” It’s not the response she was expecting; I can tell by the way her expression softens a little, surprise and a dash of appreciation taking over for the rage that was present a second ago. Her lips part, and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for her response, hoping that this is the moment where we finally get past this part of our argument and find our way back to each other, but before she can say anything Jalisa comes sweeping over, placing food and drinks we haven’t ordered yet on the table.

“You know Jalisa ended up marrying her little boyfriend, right? And we ended up being the ones wasting each other’s time.”

Her words hit me right in the chest, cracking my sternum before sinking into my heart. “I don’t think that’s true, princess.”

The tremble in her voice destroys me, but it’s the tears that turn her eyes glossy that truly do me in. Waves of regret coupled with shame wash over me, an ocean of grief I’m used to swimming in, and I reach across the table to grab her hand, lacing our fingers together. “Let me try?”

Days later, I can still feel the warmth of his skin when he reached across the table and held my hand. I can still see the pain in his eyes when I told him no, when I said that I would leave if he asked again. After that, everything fell apart, the way it always does for us. I let him drive me home—because he refused to allow me to order a car—

“Fuck, Sloane. I’m sorry.” I wrap my arms around her shoulders and squeeze tight, marveling at how the jagged edges of our hearts seem to fit together.

We loosen our grip on each other at the same time, and I pull back to look at her. Her fresh heartbreak collides with my older, but somehow just as devastating, pain.

Nic looks worse than Sloane does. And it’s not so much his appearance as it is his demeanor. The air around him is fraught with despair, heartbreak that’s both old and new clashing behind his eyes, ringing like an angry bell and mocking me for spending all my time helping Sloane navigate this breakup instead of splitting it between the two of them.

“I want to know what your plan is to fix this mess between you and Sloane.” His entire face transforms at the sound of her name, and I want to kick myself for having gone the last decade and some change without seeing it. The longing. The angst. The love. God, they’re both so far gone for each other. Sloane can’t even talk about him without her eyes taking on this far-away look, like she’s daydreaming about what could have been.

The agony in his voice makes my heart break. I know what it’s like to love someone like that, to crave their presence even though you know, for some reason or another, you shouldn’t.

His leaving is a constant, a dependable ending to unpredictable beginnings, and I don’t know what we would look like without it.

Everyone finding out about Nic’s feelings for Sloane would have only ended in tragedy, a dissolution of a family unit that was integral to the growth and development of two amazing humans who came from fucked up families. Having come from one myself, I understand the desire to protect the good things in your life. The rare, scarce blessings that are few and far between.

It made sense. The need for control. The desire to make things right for the people I care about. The exhaustion caused by carrying the responsibility of fixing things I didn’t break and could never repair.

“Wait, you’re actually in therapy?” She shifts in her seat, pulling one leg up into the swing to face me. Tiny ripples of intrigue start in the corner of her eyes and then echo in the pools of amber. I’ve missed this. Her curiosity, her willingness to engage, to ask questions and absorb the answers. “Like for real?”

Warmth spreads through my chest as her words hit me with all the heat and force of a comet, destroying me in the most devastating way. My throat constricts, emotions I can’t name flooding my system and demanding that I lean forward and kiss her, to distribute the overwhelm evenly between us.

The kind of peaceful silence that can only exist between two people who have a history as long as Mal and I have settles between us. There’s nothing but the subtle creak of the porch swing and Mallory’s quiet breathing in my ears as I count down the seconds until she leaves again. She’s said everything she came here to say, learned some things she didn’t realize she wanted to know, and now we’re done. At least for tonight.

She stays beside me for longer than I expected. Minutes passing before she heaves a long sigh, and I stop the swing with one of my feet on the ground. I stand first—hoping that being the one to initiate her exit will help ease the pain of her leaving but knowing it won’t—and offer her my hand. She takes it, allowing me to help her up but stopping short when I try to pull her into me. One of her hands lands on my chest, her palm right over my broken heart. She tilts her head back, glistening amber eyes melting just a little at the sight of my desperation. “Stay.” “You’re a glutton for punishment.” Her soft rejection stings, and I don’t have the strength to hide it. She smiles like it’s her pleasure to torment me, and like the fucking fool I am, I smile back. Happy to let her hurt me because I hope it means she still cares. God, I love her.

She turns back around to face me. “If I say no will you give up?” I take a moment to think about how to phrase my answer. “I’ve lived without you before, so logically, I know I can do it.” She frowns. “Is this supposed to be some kind of romantic declaration?” “It could be if you let me finish.” Her lips flirt with the idea of a smile before she puts a stop to it, stretching her eyes to urge me to continue. “I know I can live without you, Mallory. My heart will keep beating, my lungs will keep drawing air, but I won’t be alive. Not really. Not the way I am with you.”

“Now, I know Chris has hurt you, and even though he doesn’t hesitate to own that fact, he won’t tell me how. Only that he did. He understands your anger, Mallory, and he doesn’t even want you to let it go. He wants to hold it for you. Do you know how rare that is? To find a man who not only wants to take accountability for what he did wrong but also wants to relieve you of the burden of carrying the hurt he caused you?” All of her words are aimed at me, and they’re not missing their mark, not even a little bit, but they’re also hitting Sloane square in the chest. Right in the place where she carries love for both

Fire that burns too bright, too fast. Love that remakes you, over and over again. The journey just as painful as it is gratifying.

“You dream about me?” My heartbeat is a painful, slow thumping in my chest as I wait for his answer to my question. The prospect of starring in his dreams, happy memories we never made replacing the images of what we now know wasn’t the last day of his mother’s life, stealing my breath. He sets the box on the counter, turning it in tiny revolutions with his fingertips while his eyes devour me. “Every night. These days yours is the only face I see when I close my eyes.” “No more nightmares then?” “Nope, just you, princess.”

He arches a brow, making sure I’m aware that he’s aware of what I’m doing. Unfortunately, I don’t get to see which part of my body he decides to focus on because all of my attention goes to the box he slides across the counter to me. It’s still warm from his skin when it reaches me, and my eyes fall shut momentarily, relishing the sensation. The presence of it on the hard material reminding me of the years I’ve lived with its absence on my skin.

Sincerity is a golden thread that weaves through his words and shines in his eyes. It tugs on every one of my heartstrings, making me think of the speech Mama gave me tonight about him wanting to carry my pain. She seemed so sure about it, and it scares me that I’m starting to believe it too.

Chris leans back on the counter behind him, crossing his arms and looking completely at home in my space. Fear winds its way through my chest, waging a war with the part of me that wants, more than anything, a reality where we belong to each other like we used to.

Although we’ve never discussed it, I know some part of her thinks the approach I took to solving the issues we were facing in college was a result of my lack of faith in her abilities as a teammate, but that wasn’t it at all. I knew she could solve her own problems—hell, with how cool and level-headed she always was, I knew she could solve mine too—but I didn’t want her to have to. I wanted to give her relief, the kind of comfort that could only be found in partnerships based on trust and a mutual investment in the shared outcome. What I’d given her instead was over a decade of heartache and a lifetime of scars she won’t let me close enough to touch.

I lift a hand, one corner of my mouth pulling up into a smile while she decides whether or not she’s going to go through with this. For a second, she looks like she’s going to walk out. Her body shifts slightly, shoulders angling for the door she just walked through before she forces herself to move toward me. My heart stutters in my chest, and it’s a painful flutter that makes me lower my hand just so I can rub at it. Mallory sits down in the seat across from me, smiling at the waiter who appears out of nowhere to hand her a menu and pour her a glass of water.

“Okay,” I agree, a sadness I don’t allow myself to completely indulge caving in my chest. “Let’s be friends.”

Amber eyes rove over my face quickly, cataloging all the emotions I didn’t have a chance to tuck away before she got this close to me, and it’s like she’s reading my thoughts, sniffing out the history of us that’s still permeating the air.

My fingers press into her flesh, sinking into the pillow-soft rolls at the dip in her hip. And the hallway is quiet. The silence seemingly in observation of this moment, of something settling between us that wasn’t there before. “There.” I’m whispering, quiet enough to not disturb the fragile thing that’s just begun blooming. Its existence is tenuous, delicate like the thread I’ve just pulled out of the zipper. “I got it.”

Mallory turns to face me, and the moment our eyes meet, I know what it is that’s growing between us. Trust. More specifically, her trust in me. Warmth spreads in my chest, driven by the presence of it in her eyes. She always did value the small things, the little moments of honesty and dependability that most people tend to write off as unimportant because they think trust can only be built in instances of rare, life-changing events.

Whether she wants to acknowledge it or not, she’s my partner in this life and the next. And I won’t ever make the mistake of behaving like she isn’t.

“Giselle’s been calling me a lot lately.” Panic flares in Mallory’s eyes, sending a sharp pain through my chest. I step forward, prepared to pull her into my arms and provide all the reassurance she could need, but she steps back. “Princess—” Desperation coats each syllable of the nickname I gave her a lifetime ago, the way it always seems to these days, and I’m unashamed. I want her to know that I’m prepared to beg, to bleed, to die for her.

My heart sinks, and my own fear trickles down my spine as my brain tells me I’m about to be punished for my honesty. I push the thought aside, forcing my worries to the back of my mind, so I can address Mallory’s.

“Because that’s the way we wanted it. It’s hard to talk about it, to make your grief real to other people when they might have only seen your baby as a possibility, not a reality.”

Now, that quiet is being interrupted by Mallory’s voice. The husky, soft sound causing a bubble of love and wonder to expand in my chest because there are notes of worry underneath the melody of her greeting.

A sharp intake of breath and then silence that I have to fill even though I want to exist here, in the solitude of her quiet for the rest of my days.

“Me too, and I’m sorry for leaning on you too hard.” She’s rushing again. Pushing the words out quicker than I can process them. “It couldn’t have been easy for you, carrying my stuff on top of yours.” Her apology catches me completely off guard, and I’m shaking my head even though she can’t see me. “Don’t apologize, princess. Your burdens are mine. I was made to carry them.”

Again, her concern is touching, twisting its way into my heart and spreading through my chest, preventing me from telling her I’d already thought about that.

When he returned from California, almost twenty-four hours after upending my world by telling me that he was made to carry my burdens, he texted to let me know he was back and asked if we could meet up. I stared at the message for hours, a dizzying kind of relief flowing through me in riotous waves that had nothing to do with his request to get together and everything to do with me being happy that he had come back. Too happy. Happier than a friend should be. Happier than a woman hellbent on keeping her life disentangled from the life of a man who’d hurt her numerous times should be.

I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about it until now. When I have the admiration in Van and Ter's eyes warming my skin, reminding me of what the silent encouragement of Black women can do for your self-esteem.

Everyone in the room joins in on the laughter, and for a second, I’m stunned by the sound. Of joy filling the room. Of family and love that expands, slipping into the empty cracks left by loss. A rough palm lands on my forearm, the warmth of it bleeding through the fabric of my sweater and snapping me out of my thoughts. I look down and fall face-first into two pools of honey, sinking slowly into the warm, viscous depths without so much as a single cry for help.

“You should sit down, princess,” Chris says. His voice is so soft, but it rolls through me like a

snap of thunder, shifting the ground beneath my feet and making the glass cake plate in my hand tremble.

matter how long I try to savor it, none of it tastes like anything. Still, I chew, swallow, and take a second helping of everything, especially the birthday cake, because no one, not even Margaret, has ever made me one from scratch. Of course, it also doesn't hurt that Mallory was the one cutting it, and her fingers brushed mine every time I held my plate up for her to deposit a slice.

The urge to confirm and solve this problem for her blooms in my chest, fast and vicious, as it sprouts roots that wrap around my heart and ribs. Beautiful but toxic flowers spread soft yet unruly petals that threaten to blot out my vision, and I push out a gentle, hopefully undetectable, breath to calm myself down, knowing that this, above all else, is our problem. My incessant need to fix, to intervene, to protect when all I really have to do is listen. To ask the right questions and hold space for her answers.

“Are you asking as a friend?”